TextConverter

The TextConverter

With the TextConverter, texts and any type of text file can be edited and converted in many different ways. It is possible to process single or also multiple text files at the same time without having to open each file individually, as well as to change unsaved texts on-the-fly without storing them.

There are scopes of application for nearly all computer users working with texts or text files. Whenever parts of texts or text files have to be replaced, certain passages have to be deleted, rewritten or inserted, specific lines, CSV fields or XML elements have to be edited, files have to be joined, separated or converted into another format, you can always use the Text Converter.

For the editing, numerous actions from the sections text actions, line actions, CSV actions, XML actions and file actions as well as functions for format and data conversions are available:

Text Actions

With the text actions of the TextConverter you can edit your texts as a whole. In this section you can find classic text processing functions such as actions for replacing, deleting and trimming text (each also across several lines), for prepending, appending and inserting text, but also functions for rewriting, numbering or changing the writing and the capitalization of texts. Several of these actions can be combined into action lists and thereby used together.

In addition, you can select from some preset options such as for removing double spaces, tabs or line breaks, for encoding or decoding named entities, URLs or syntactic XML/HTML characters as well as for removing HTML or XML tags that can be applied with just one click, without having to configure the corresponding actions yourself.

Line Actions

Text can be edited on the basis of lines using the actions from the line actions section. On the one hand, these actions make it possible to restrict functions such as replacements, deletions or insertions to certain lines. On the other hand, the lines of a text can also be edited as such. As an example, it is possible to delete, copy, move, swap or sort individual lines. Apart from that, using the line actions, you can also, for example, remove, insert or replace line breaks or add line numbers to texts.

When using the line actions, a line does not necessarily have to be defined by a typical standard line break: In the TextConverter, also user-defined line break types such as breaks at one or more freely definable characters or code points as well as breaks after a certain number of characters can be defined. That means that the line actions can also be used for editings at the level of text parts other than classic lines.

CSV Actions

With the CSV actions you can edit texts and data within a CSV structure. Available are the classic functions for editing texts that can be limited to arbitrary fields, rows and columns of the CSV structure, but also numerous CSV-specific actions such as deleting, copying or pasting columns, changing the column order, rotating and mirroring the data as well as arithmetic operations to change the values of one or more fields or columns according to a specific pattern.

Similar to the line editing functions, also when defining the CSV structure you are not limited to the classic field separators such as comma, semicolon or tab: In addition to the automatic recognition of the CSV characters used, you can also define any own characters or code points (including several) as well as fixed field and line lengths for the interpretation of the data structure.

XML Actions

If you want to edit texts or text files such as XML data or HTML files within an XML structure, you can use the TextConverter's XML actions for this. With these actions you can edit specific attribute names, attribute values, tag names and inner texts of an XML structure using classic text editing functions such as replace, delete, trim, prepend, append and insert, you can delete certain elements or attributes from an XML structure, you can add or insert elements or attributes into an XML structure and the like.

In the individual XML actions, you can select the inner texts, tag names, attribute names and attribute values to be processed via their names as well as via selectors, as they are also used in CSS style sheets. Alternatively you can also apply the respective actions to all elements.

Action Lists

Action lists offer you the possibility of combining any number of actions in any order and thus applying and managing them as a bundle. It doesn't matter whether the individual actions of an action list come from the areas of text actions, line actions, CSV actions or XML actions, or whether your action list consists of different action types or multiple actions of the same type.

As with the standard actions, the text actions of an action list always refer to the text as a whole, while the scope of the XML actions can be varied specifying selectors and attribute names. Apart from that, the application areas of the line and CSV actions can not only be determined using line numbers and column numbers in the action lists, but alternatively also using the SELECT and DESELECT function, with which the lines and columns to which an action should refer can be limited completely flexible with any number of different criteria. As an example, with this, it is possible to limit the application of an action only to all odd lines with more than 100 characters that do not contain numbers and have a line number between 100 and 200.

The built-in action list editor supports you in creating the action lists. In this editor you can create, change and manage the actions of an action list via a graphical user interface.

Placeholders and References

In the text fields of the text actions, line actions, CSV actions, XML actions, as well as in the action lists, you can use placeholders and references that are dynamically replaced with what they stand for when the respective action is applied. There are placeholders, for example, for the current date and time, for the file name and the file path, for file properties such as the file size or the file date as well as for numbering of files and numbering within files.

References are a special type of placeholder that you can use to insert content from the current text, from the current file, or from other files into the text fields of all TextConverter actions. This can be, for example, one or more characters, words or lines, but also fields from CSV data, inner texts or attribute values from an XML structure as well as the content of entire files. The different types of references can be combined with each other, for example to insert only certain words or characters from a line, and with the functional placeholders the content can also be edited as required before insertion, for example by using the trim function to remove whitespace from the beginning and the end from a referenced text before inserting it.

Regular Expressions

Wherever appropriate, the TextConverter also supports the use of regular expressions. For example, the replacement and deletion functions of the text, line, CSV and XML actions as well as the corresponding functional placeholders for references can be used not only with simple texts but also with any regular expression. Line actions and CSV actions can be applied not only in rows and fields having specific line numbers or column numbers, but also in rows respectively fields, whose content corresponds in whole or in part to a specific regular expression. In addition, as other examples, texts can also be searched with the help of regular expressions, and the text filters and line filters of the reference function can also be used with regular expressions in order to filter the referenced texts or lines.

By using regular expressions, the possible applications of the corresponding functions are massively expanded. For example, the replace function can also be used to rewrite and reformat text components (e.g. to change the format of dates, numbers or other structures), text components that follow a specific pattern can easily be replaced or removed, and searches can be carried out in a more general form, for example in order to search for whole character classes or text fragments with certain criteria.

Join or Split Files

While the functions and actions of the TextConverter presented so far relate to editing the content of text files, the file actions can also be used to change text files at the file level. For example, it is possible to concatenate any number of text files in order to save them as a new single file or - in the opposite direction - it is also possible to save the content of individual files in several new files. The separation of the files can be carried out, for exmample, at an arbitrary text or regular expression, at line breaks, after a certain number of characters, or using a combination of these criteria.

In combination with the other actions of the TextConverter, the files can optionally additionally be processed before or after the separation or concatination, for example to combine only parts of certain files or to transfer only certain contents of the original files to the new files. In this process, also the use of references can be helpful.

Encoding and Line Break Type

In the file actions, you can also find the options regarding the encoding and the line break type used for reading and writing the text files. By default, that means if you keep the initial settings here, the TextConverter will try to automatically detect the encoding and the line break type of a text or a text file in order to use these again for saving. However, you can of course alternatively define your own settings both for reading and for saving here.

For the encoding, there are numerous supported encoding formats from ASCII as well as Latin-1, Latin-2, CP437 and the Windows Code Pages to UTF-7, UTF-8, UTF-16 LE, UTF-16 BE, UTF-32 LE and UTF-32 BE available. In addition, you can specify whether or not a Byte Order Mark should be used.

As line break type, you can either choose from a selection of typical line break types such as CR LF (Windows) or LF (macOS) or you can define single or multiple user-defined line breaks using arbitrary characters or code points. In addition, lines that are defined by a fixed number of characters can also be processed with the TextConverter.

In addition to editing the content of texts and text files, these functions can therefore also be used to only change the encoding and the line break type, so that, for example, files from other operating systems become readable on your system. The functions for this corresponds to those of the TextEncoder.

Conversion to other File Formats

In addition to changing the encoding or the line break type of a file as introduced in the last section, the TextConverter can also be used to change the entire format of a file. For example, you can convert arbitrary text files into images or Office documents with the TextConverter. Regarding the image export, the image formats JPG, PNG and BMP are supported - the used font, colors as well as the margins and spacings can be adjusted as desired. Additionally, an Office export is possible into the document formats DOCX and ODT as well as in the spreadsheet formats XLSX and ODS. The document formats can be opened, for example, with Microsoft Word, LibreOffice Writer or OpenOffice Writer. The spreadsheet formats are suitable for Microsoft Excel, LibreOffice Calc and OpenOffice Calc. In order to export in one of these formats, it is sufficient to just select one of the mentioned file extensions as desired file extension in the storage options.

Before exporting to one of these formats, you can of course use all the other functions of the TextConverter to adjust the original files as you wish. As an example, when exporting as spreadsheet into one of the formats XLSX or ODS, you can first use the functions from the CSV actions area, for example, to convert arbitrary text files into the required CSV format for the export, to set rules for defining the columns, to remove unneeded columns or to edit the exported CSV data in another way.

Data Conversion

The functions of the TextConverter can also be used to convert data or to change the structure of data. On the one hand, the TextConverter already provides you with some predefined functions that can be found in the section Actions > Format, on the other hand you can also carry out your own user-defined data conversions by combining the various functions and actions of the TextConverter.

Examples for some predefined conversion functions are the conversions CSV to HTML (as a table), CSV to XML (CSV fields either as nodes or attributes) as well as CSV to SQL (as INSERT or UPDATE query). In order to carry out these predefined conversions, you only have to activate the checkbox of the respective action.

Transcriptions and Transliterations

A special case of data conversion that can be carried out with the TextConverter is transcription and transliteration, that is the rewriting of texts from one writing system to another. In addition to the numerous writing systems already supported by the TextConverter with preset transcription rules such as Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Armenian, Arabic, Japanese (Hiragana and Katakana), Georgian, Devanagari and Thai, you can also create, apply and save arbitrary own transcriptions or transliterations. These own rules can be both created from scratch or you can derive them from any preset transcriptions.

With this, you can use the Text Converter to immediately convert a text with - for example - Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic or Japanese characters into a text with Latin letters (or vice versa). When creating your own rules for transcriptions and transliterations, not only simple search-and-replace pairs can be defined, but also, for example, position rules to determine at which position within a word a rule should be applied.

Unicode Support

Of course, the TextConverter offers you full Unicode support, so that arbitrary Unicode characters can be used in all functions and actions of the program as well as in the texts to be edited, up to the file names. So, in the TextConverter you can not only edit texts with Latin letters but also, for example, use Chinese, Japanese or Korean characters, Cyrillic or Greek letters as well as Unicode special characters and symbols and you can mix the different characters with one another as you wish.

In some functions, such as when configuring custom line breaks or CSV field delimiters, your desired characters can also be specified directly via their Unicode Codepoints.

On-The-Fly-Conversions

In addition to the editing of stored files, the TextConverter also offers an on-the-fly conversion of unstored texts. This makes it possible to edit a text with the complete functionality of the TextConverter without opening a file and without the text even having to be available as a file.

Just copy or write the text you want to edit into the field "Original" and the field "Preview" will automatically show the converted version of that text according to all currently activated actions and action lists. With this function you can, for example, edit texts or parts of texts from other applications quickly and easily using the TextConverter options in order to then copy the result back into the original application.

Script Control

All introduced functions and actions of the TextConverter can not only be configured and used via the graphical user interface, but alternatively also via the command line using the script control of the TextConverter. In this way, the TextConverter can be automated and integrated into scripts, for example.

As parameters, you can pass, for example, single files, entire folders, filters for searching files in the folders, single actions, paths to action lists or setting files, storage locations, formats for reading and saving and much more. Of course, you can easily configure the settings and action lists to be passed using the TextConverter's graphical user interface before applying them.

Download

Download the TextConverter for free in the download area for Windows and learn in the first steps how you can benefit from this application. Additionally, we are collecting frequently asked question about the TextConverter on the FAQ page for you. The TextConverter is portable, you can use the program directly without an installation.

Screenshots

You want to first see what the TextConverter looks like? On the screenshot page we have compiled some screenshots of the TextConverter for you.